Balliol welcomes its first female master in 755 years

Oxford’s Balliol College has some famous alumni. They include Aldous Huxley, Adam Smith, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Chris Patten and Boris Johnson. Now in its 755th year, Balliol welcomes its first female Master. Helen Ghosh describes Balliol’s culture and says the college is famous for producing graduates with a social conscience.

Transcript

Robyn Williams:The Science Show on RN, where our next remarkable woman has just become the first to head one of Oxford's most famous colleges, Balliol. What does Dame Helen Ghosh make of her first year?

Helen Ghosh: I think Balliol has a fantastically strong (and I don't use this term much in front of the fellows at the Balliol), it has a very strong brand. When you use the name Balliol, even people who know nothing about Oxford University think of politics because we produce lots of prime ministers, they think of radical students because in the 1960s and '70s students here were famous for protesting and marching on all sorts of subjects of the day. Just at the moment they think about Boris Johnson and Brexit because Boris is the most famous alumnus of Balliol on the national stage today.

Robyn Williams: What about Richard Dawkins?

Helen Ghosh: Richard Dawkins, also of course a famous alumnus of Balliol, a family tradition as I discovered the other day at a lecture which Richard has endowed on zoology. Interestingly I don't think if I talk to students about what are the big intellectual debates of the day, the question of science and theology is not one that engages them in the way that perhaps when The Selfish Gene was published it was something that nationally was debated. It's not nationally debated now. Students today, and of course I've only had one term's experience, generally over a Pimm's or with an anxious student running up to finals. The kinds of things that occupy them much more are identity politics and equality and all sorts of issues which are very important to us and to the university, about equality and access, those sorts of things. Those seem to be the kind of politics that interests these students today.

Robyn Williams: What about the place of science in academe next to the arts? We talk of STEAM of course. If you are here, if you are in any university, sometimes it's frowned upon. I know some people who are determined to keep these things separate, saying you can't have the boundaries blurred because you need to learn so much because if you're going to be an effective scientist you need to get on top of the material. Are you able to encourage that or do you stand back and let the various disciplines carry on themselves?

Helen Ghosh: The essence of the collegiate system, the idea of having a college where you have students from all sorts of disciplines together meeting, whether it's on their staircase going to the bathroom, whether it's in the dining hall, whether it's on the street outside, the whole point of a collegiate university is that the disciplines should talk to each other. And I think particularly when you talk, for example, to philosophers here, the idea that maths and physics and philosophy are in fact on a continuum is something that the intelligent student realises.

And we've also…in this college we are lucky enough to have a number of people who have thought about precisely these sorts of issues. Denis Noble, a famous scientist, is one of our emeritus fellows, and he of course has thought very deeply about the question of unknowability and the limits of what science can know and what is beyond the limit of what science can know. Could it possibly be G.O.D? So I think there is in this college quite a healthy tradition in trying to link science, philosophy and the unknowable, which of course in terms…given my background as a historian, as an arts person, it seems to me that the unknowable, the thing that can fill that vacuum is indeed the study of the arts.

Robyn Williams: Yes, Denis Noble has been on The Science Show many times talking about the heart, talking about how you can compute the heart's activity and how there is no leading part of the heart that gets it all together, but all the cells coordinate somehow. And his book about philosophy and science was based on music because he wrote each chapter with a different musical title. It's one of the great examples of crossing the boundary like that.

I read something in your own bio about windmills and how much you like them aesthetically, not necessarily in terms of energy. But why was that supposed to be controversial?

Helen Ghosh: At that time I was a civil servant, I had a wonderfully interesting, enjoyable career as a civil servant for 30 years, and then I thought in my mid-50s I'd like to try leading in another context. And the job leading the National Trust, as many listeners will know, a much loved institution in Britain, 5 million members, something like more than 20 million visits to National Trust properties every year, and it linked my background as a historian with my interest and passion for the environment.

Because of its status as a national institution, various parts of the media like to catch the National Trust out, like to demonstrate that it's either far too elitist and right-wing or far too socialist and left-wing, and as its leader I was often caught in the crossfire. My then chairman, the chairman of the National Trust when I first arrived there was a wonderful journalist called Simon Jenkins who was at one stage the editor of the Times, and he had very strong views on windfarms, on-land windfarms, not so much those out at sea, and he was well known to be a strong opponent aesthetically and in every other sense of windfarms on land.

And so I think it was a journalist from the Daily Telegraph or one of the more right-wing press decided he'd try and catch me out at the end of an interview and said to me, almost as he was leaving going through the door, he said, 'Your chairman Sir Simon Jenkins abhors windfarms and windmills. What's your view?' And of course very innocently but truly and keeping in line with the National Trust policy, being a good public servant, I said, 'Well, they have to be put in the right place but I think in the right place there can be something very beautiful about the movement of a windmill.' This was then of course splashed across the media as 'Head of the National Trust adores windmills'. Whereas in fact what it was was simply saying in the right place at the right time I think they can be quite beautiful. And many people do think that, but it was regarded by some parts of the press as a sign that I was a dangerous left-wing radical.

Robyn Williams: How interesting, because I often wonder…and of course I have no opinions of my own because I work for the ABC and I'm a reporter, however in a very bipartisan sense, if you look at a coal mine and if you look at the way the coal stack in Aberfan crushed the school and the kind of filth that comes out of such places, because my father was a coalminer in south Wales, one is puzzled by the comparison, let alone the implications. But it just so happens, funnily enough, that our new Minister for Energy, who used to be at Oxford, at New College, also dislikes windmills, and I don't know whether he's applying it to policy, but it really is rather puzzling thing. How do you think the debate is on in Britain in general about energy futures and such things? Do they squeeze it in between Brexit discussions?

Helen Ghosh: I think that the question of a long-term energy policy and the implications of how that relates to climate change is something that gets far too little public debate. And, as you say, everyone is much more het up about customs unions and the European Court of Justice and all of those sorts of things. But in the long term, as we know, any economy rests on having a sustainable and reliable source of energy. I mean, in fact surreptitiously and partly I think because of the commitments we had made as members of the European Union, we have now got to the stage in this country where on certain days, not high usage days, more than 50% of the energy in the UK is provided from renewable sources.

Some of the heat, if I can use the pun, went out of the debate when I think it was shown pretty clearly by science that land-based windfarms were not anything like as effective as the kinds of arrays of windfarms that you see out to sea where there is a more constant supply of wind. And so we haven't had big public rows about planting big windfarms on land in this country.

In Scotland, many much more wild acres in which they can put windfarms, it's been a relatively uncontroversial thing. Of course in England we are all just packed in in population terms, and so those sorts of issues become more acute. But I think the debate has gone away. How we will be heating, lighting and fuelling ourselves in 50 years' time I think is still a question of debate. We of course have commissioned, but they are a long time coming, new nuclear power stations. Again, that's very controversial. But things like the geopolitics of our relations with Russia and the rest of Europe will have a big part to play. I think it should be more part of the national debate.

Robyn Williams: Yes, in fact Lord Stern the other day, I think it was about three weeks ago, put out a report, an update of his original one, saying that if you prepare by looking at the carbon emissions and do so effectively and encourage the new industries, you will have $26 trillion advantage, not as a nation but of course as a globe. It's most impressive. Of course capitalism was invented here at this college, wasn't it, by Adam Smith, but he did say that you can't simply have a market without a solid community. And John Stuart Mill said that as well.

So as a last point really, as you are in charge, not just of academics but students, bright students, do they have a sense of future amongst all this confusion, you know, if you can compare generations, do you think?

Helen Ghosh: I think first of all as a historian I should pick you up on 'we gave birth to capitalism because Adam Smith came to this college'. He came down to Oxford from Glasgow as one of our Snell exhibitioners, we have wonderful historic links…

Robyn Williams: And hated it here.

Helen Ghosh: And hated it here. One might say the university was in the pits of its 18th-century port and prejudice era, and he absolutely hated it here. So I really think we should give the credit for Adam Smith, all the credit that's due, to Scotland rather than the University of Oxford.

I've been immensely encouraged, alongside I think the issues that concern many about identity politics and their own identity. I have been immensely encouraged by the fact that I've talked to a lot of students who have what I would regard as (and I think this is crucial for the future of society as a whole) a social conscience. Balliol has always been famous for sending its students out globally, of course in the 19th century and very controversially to run the colonies, but more recently to explore America, explore the Far East. Very high percentages, well more than half of our graduate students are international students.

But I've been talking to students who are interested in looking at people sadly sleeping rough on the streets of Oxford. We have, you will know, historically Benjamin Jowett, one of our very famous masters of the past, and his friends, the fellows at the time, were really interested in the social problems of Britain. And one of them, Arnold Toynbee, founded a mission in the East End of London which in fact I'm visiting later this week. And I think students here do recognise that, yes, many of them will find a place in financial services, in the law, but they also feel that they can do great things in NGOs, social enterprises, applying their fantastic computer science and economic and social studies skills to making the world a better place for their fellow citizens. So I am encouraged by that. Their lives are ones that have changed…they have been in a society that has changed so much. I very much doubt if any of them predicts what they will be doing when they are 50, whereas I pretty well knew in the more stable days of the '60s, '70s and '80s, having chosen to be a civil servant I'd probably be a civil servant when I was 50, which I was, though it was a very different kind of job than the one I expected.

Robyn Williams: Dame Helen Ghosh, Master of Balliol College in Oxford, the first woman to be master since the college was founded in 1263. And it is best known Australian graduate (still with us) may be Kim Beazley, now Governor of Western Australia.